GoGet
is a shared fleet of cars that members can use at a whim. You pay your membership with a $500 deposit, hop online to book a car for a few hours, use a swipe card to unlock the door and drive away. When you’re done, you park it and leave the keys behind.

If that sounds radical enough for a nation addicted to owning our own cars, the near future could be even more foreign.

Trials by the University of New South Wales with the Glebe-based shared economy service aim to bring self-driving cars to the road before the decade is out. But, in a highly automated future, who is responsible for a crash? Would users of the service need a licence?

As with any major technology trend in the past century or more, regulators and ­governments globally are struggling to ­create rules around something that has never existed before. Many governments aren’t asking the right questions because they don’t know who to ask.

According to GoGet co-founder
Bruce Jeffreys
, most services are emerging into a policy and regulatory vacuum.

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“It’s a massive challenge for government because they’re used to regulating large industries with peak bodies, but instead you have a much more fine-grained economy," he says.

As a result incumbents have the advantage in protecting their patch by sounding potentially spurious alarm bells – something
Peter Williams
at Deloitte calls the “denigrate, deny and sue" reflex.

Safety and quality concerns

The Transport Tourism Forum, one such peak body for incumbent operators like hotel chains, warns that services like Airbnb fail to offer the same safety and quality ­guarantees of an established hotel chain or serviced apartment.

“If you’re staying in that type of product you’re playing the lucky dip," says chief ­executive
Ken Morrison
. “It’s really hard to envisage how these things could be regulated. There isn’t a level playing field."

Late last year, an Uber driver, off-duty at the time, struck and killed a six-year-old girl in San Francisco. The hire car ­booking ­company claimed no responsibility for the situation, exposing the issue of who, exactly, cops the blame when things go wrong.

In a housing market where services like Airbnb operate, local and state governments are grappling with how to manage leases that run for one or two days. The NSW government is set to introduce laws that allow apartment buildings’ body corporates to ban owners from leasing via Airbnb.

The issue has already hit the courts, with a ruling in the Victorian supreme court overturning one strata body’s attempt to ban the practice using the building code.

In Brisbane, the rules are different again, with strata lawyers saying the government has fallen well behind the technology and that there is an urgent need to update the statutes to cater for the rise of Airbnb’s ­popularity.

Overseas, housing laws have moved the other direction, opening up home-­sharing rights, with some conditions, in France, Amsterdam and London.

Matter of time

Airbnb co-founder
Nate Blecharczyk
says it’s only a matter of time before other jurisdictions follow suit.

“We have to recognise this is certainly new behaviour that’s happening in a highly regulated industry, whose regulations often date back 30 or 40 years, and it’s an activity that’s basically sprung up overnight," he says.

“The majority of cities around the world are still trying to work out what’s ­happening. I expect it will take quite a while to propagate."

Then there’s tax. As more activity shifts from bricks and mortar businesses and permanently employed workers towards the collaborative economy, the tax man will have to pay attention.

It’s one thing to demand tax returns from a large established hotel chain. It’s quite another to hope that thousands of individuals looking to “earn a bit on the side" by ­casually renting out their house via a website based in Ireland declare their income.

Pressed into action by US municipal authorities, Airbnb is trialling collecting and paying hotel taxes in San Francisco and Portland.

At the same time, AFR Weekend can reveal the company has begun shifting all international revenues outside the US through an Ireland headquarters, a practice normally used by multinationals to minimise local taxes.

Apparently, Airbnb isn’t implementing this revenue-shifting for tax reasons, but rather for Dublin’s “hospitality", said the company’s chief executive,
Brian Chesky
.

He was not available for an interview with AFR Weekend when contacted about the new terms of service and why the company had chosen Ireland as its European base. But he recently said Ireland’s low corporate tax rate “wasn’t one of the first two or three considerations" for moving there.

Australian regulators are yet to take notice of an appetite for shared buying, ­simply because it still makes up a tiny proportion of the nation’s economy, says tax expert
Phil Ruthven
.

However, many experts say there will come a time when collaborative consumption, aided by technology, does make up a bigger portion of Australia’s GDP. And should companies then start to dodge their tax obligations, authorities will step in.

“If it’s going to happen it will happen within the next ten years," Ruthven says. “They may introduce a flat tax on the seller."

At this stage, the Tax Office doesn’t have the shared economy on its radar as a specific topic.

“The ATO monitors risks but have no general comments to make on this trend as it covers too broad a range of circumstance," says Deputy Commissioner
Mark Konza
.